Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
the lack of support that they received from industry practitioners. Neither
organization was able to clearly establish its relevance to the needs of
either workers or their managers. “Neither organization . . . has done
much for the industry or for society as a whole,” argued one
Datamation
editorial from 1965. “We think the time is ripe to more clearly defi ne
larger, more important long-range goals which distinguish a professional
society from a technician's association.”
108
Employers looked to the
professional associations to provide a supply of reliable, capable pro-
grammers. As was apparent from the impassioned debates about the
structure and relevance of computer science curricula, however, it was
far from obvious to many managers that formal educational programs
contributed much to the production of professional programmers. The
ACM's continued devotion to theoretical computer science made it seem
out of touch with the practical demands of business. The DPMA's CDP
program, although it was much more oriented to business data process-
ing, failed to achieve widespread industry acceptance. As a result, it
also was not able to guarantee the kind of standardized labor force in
which corporations were interested. Employers saw little value in either
organization.
The Limits of Professionalism
In his monograph on
Offi ce Automation in Social Perspective
from 1968,
Oxford sociologist Hans Rhee observed that “the computer elite are
beginning to erect collective defenses against the lay world. They are
beginning to develop a sense of professional identity and values.” But the
process of establishing professional attitudes and controls, and a profes-
sional conscience and solidarity, Rhee suggested, had “not yet advanced
very far.”
109
He could just have easily been describing the computing
professions as they existed a decade earlier or a decade afterward. By
1968 computing had acquired many of the trappings of professionalism:
academic computer science departments, certifi cation programs, and pro-
fessional associations. And yet most computing practitioners were not
widely regarded as professionals, at least not in the eyes of the general
public. In 1967, for example, the U.S. Civil Service Commission declared
data processing personnel to be nonexempt employees, offi cially catego-
rizing programmers as technicians rather than professionals. Although
this decision did not affect the lives or practices of programmers, it repre-
sented a symbolic defeat for professional associations such as the ACM,
which lobbied hard to have it overturned.
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